Jim Whitehouse founded Arden Engineering & Sports cars in the mid 1950’s at Penn Lane, Tamworth in Arden.
Jim was a competitor in various types of motor sport and the business grew from preparing cars and into producing performance kits under the banner of Arden Conversions Ltd.
Although he had supplied quite a variety of tuning items of various specifications without doubt the Arden alloy 8 port head was his greatest development and its still in production to this day using the original tooling.
It was developed during 1966/7 and proved to be such a success that the BMC competitions department Special Tuning decided that this head was the way to go and dropped any further development on their own cast iron 8 port design and placed an initial order for 200 with Arden and then sold it as a genuine BMC part.
I doubt very much that one was ever fitted to a Morris Minor mainly down to cost and the Mini was the car of the day although some of their period items probably were, and at this time in 2009 they cost just under £1,800 just for the head, but you never know.
And thanks to the Mini and Metro centre for allowing me to take some pictures of their early Arden 8 port alloy cylinder head.